I use the water calculator on brew365.com and had a question about the loss of water from break material, hops, etc. On this site the default number is 1/2 gal. Does that sound correct with an ounce or so of pellet hops? Should it be more....less?

Is there any constant formula to use or constant number when determining the loss from the trub?

It really depends on your system. If you were using a hanging hop bag and a bottom drain on the kettle you'd have close to 0 gal lost to kettle break etc. For my system it does depend on the amount of hops, but there is also a small amount that gets left behind no matter what (I've worked to eliminate as much of that as possible.) It is just trial and error per system.

__________________
"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people." - V

Basically all i do is boil my wort and since I'm just using pellets this early on I dump everything into the fermenter bucket through a regular kitchen strainer (sanitized of course!!!). If need be I usually squeeze out the hops very gently.